Good News: The National Science Foundation has confirmed that funding is available for the workshop. We encourage you to begin making travel arrangements to attend. Our thanks to NSF for continuing to support this important community workshop.
The Unidata Users Committee invites you to join Unidata staff, community members, and distinguished speakers this June in Boulder, Colorado. The goal of this year's workshop is to raise awareness of the current trends in the academic geoscience community with an emphasis on Data Proximate Analysis, Machine Learning and Data Analytics, Using GOES-16 Data, and Working with Ensemble NWP Output. Scientists and educators from the academic geoscience community will present ideas and techniques for making effective use of geoscience data and share activities, course materials, and ideas for improving education and research. There will be hands-on workshops, a poster session, and time for informal discussions with presenters and Unidata developers.
The THREDDS Development Team is preparing for the release of the first public beta of version 5 of the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), scheduled on or before March 19th, 2018. TDS v5 includes some major under-the-hood changes, which we will detail in the release notice. A beta version of netCDF-Java v5 will be announced at some point after the first stable release of the TDS v5.
Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.
The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service by 23 March 2018. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies.
This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting, was held January 7-11 in Austin, Texas. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.
Read on for some highlights from the conference as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.
Unidata community members Ivo Jimenez and Dr. Carlos Maltzahn from the University of California, Santa Cruz, along with Kevin Tyle from the University at Albany, will be presenting an AMS Short Course titled Reproducible Atmospheric Science Workflows Using Open Source Tools: An Introduction to the Popper Experimentation Protocol. The course focuses on an exciting new open-source toolset developed by researchers at UC Santa Cruz with specific tie-ins to reproducible workflows in atmospheric science modeling using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF), both in research and the classroom.
Unidata developers Ryan May and John Leeman, together with Kevin Goebbert from Valparaiso University, will be teaching a one-day short course titled “Python for Dynamical Meteorology Using MetPy” at the 2018 AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. The format of the course is like that of our larger Python workshop, relying on Jupyter notebooks to teach several core concepts. The crux of the course is to access remote data sets and use MetPy to perform analyses relevant to synoptic/dynamic meteorology. The goal is to go beyond the traditional introduction to Python and work on some concrete, meteorology-specific problems. As a result, familiarity with Python, NumPy, and Matplotlib is assumed.
Will virtual reality become a useful tool for the atmospheric sciences? If you're attending the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (December 11-15, 2017 in New Orleans, LA), be sure to drop by the UCAR Community Programs booth in the exhibition hall for some virtual reality demonstrations showing both observational and forecast data from hurricane Irma, which barrelled through the Caribbean in September 2017.
Unidata staff members Ward Fisher and Jeff Weber have been working with scientists at the Geological Survey of the Netherlands to figure out how to use netCDF datasets in the Survey's virtual reality system. Together with software developers from the research organization TNO in the Netherlands, this group has put together a visualization of hurricane Irma that can be can be investigated and manipulated (i.e. thin sliced, filtered, scaled, etc.) in real-time by multiple users with HTC Vive devices.
Unidata Software Training Workshops provide training on software packages created or supported by Unidata, and provide background information and context to help attendees make more effective use of the software in their own scientific workflows. While the workshops are designed primarily to benefit the academic community, representatives from government agencies and commercial entities are also invited to participate.
Traditionally, Unidata Program Center staff have provided training workshops each year. In recent years, attendance at workshops in Boulder has declined, raising the question of whether this is the best way to serve our community.
Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the American Geophysical Union 2017 Fall meeting, December 11-15 2017, in New Orleans, LA. The schedule here lists specific sessions at which UPC staff will be presenting or in attendance. See the AGU Fall meeting Scientific Program for additional information on the sessions.
In addition to the talks and poster sessions listed here, Unidata staff will be spending time at the UCAR Community Programs booth in the Exhibit Hall. Stop by to chat!
Lucas Sterzinger's capstone (undergraduate senior) research project at the University of North Dakota (UND) investigated how cloud computing services could be used to run weather models, specifically for small businesses.
In this article, Lucas summarizes his project, which looked at whether hosting servers in the cloud a reasonable alternative to buying physical hardware to be located on-site.
